XCOM 2 looks, sounds, and plays like a turn-based strategy game about beating back an alien occupation. Trust me, though: it's really a game about putting out fires. Over time, the game grows increasingly overrun with tasks that force you to pick and choose just a handful of permadeath-laden, turn-based missions to send squads on. Not every mission can be tackled, of course, and you just have to live with the extra aliens, reduced monthly income, and encroaching game-ending conflicts from the fires you can't put out.

That's how the base game began, anyway. Over the course of a campaign, it became clear that XCOM 2 didn't have enough fuel to keep the fires burning. One crack squad with enough experience, arms, and armor could eventually put any number of aliens to shame in the turn-based ground game. The overarching strategy layer then became an exercise in endlessly beefing up until you were as ready as can be for the final assault.

War of the Chosen, the game's first and likely last full expansion, deals with that problem with a simple maxim: more is more. More maps, more enemies, more abilities, more buildings, more to manage between missions, more story and characters, more bosses. In short, more fires that grow into raging infernos in the mid-to-late-game.

The Chosen few

The titular Chosen who now stalk discrete zones across the Earth are most emblematic of this maxim. The trio acts like a miniature Shadow of Mordor nemesis system, repeatedly ambushing you on otherwise innocuous missions and referencing past battles. Each of the three Chosen—the Warlock, the Hunter, and the Assassin—comes with a basic set of abilities as well as auto-generated names, strengths, and weaknesses. Over time, they'll also develop new strengths if the XCOM squad isn't quick enough to sniff and snuff them out.

To aid in that snuffing is the other biggest addition in this expansion: resistance factions. In vanilla XCOM 2, the human resistance was around but largely invisible: a nameless, faceless conveyance of quick boosts between missions. You could scan overworld blips for resources the resistance left behind and expand your actionable territory by contacting its unseen representatives (which basically amounted to scanning different blips).

In War of the Chosen, however, dissident Earth is split into three unique factions, each of which conveniently matches the territory of a given Chosen. In turn, each cabal comes with its own unique properties both on and off the battlefield.

Each group's characteristics (and characters, for that matter) make this the most distinctly story-driven XCOM product to date. That might seem unnecessary in a game about mathematical triage and risk analysis, but it's exactly the kind of addition I never knew I needed from the series. The drama of every "97 percent" shot missed and every mind control attempt resisted is heightened beyond the usual statistical frustration. Now it's personal, thanks to distinctly named, voiced, and dressed participants on both sides.

Human-on-alien-on-alien/human hybrid violence

Among the resistance, the Reapers are alien-eating stealth troopers that don't get spotted when the rest of an XCOM squad does. This makes them excellent scouts. The Skirmishers used to be alien ground troops but have since shirked off the mind control that made them so disagreeable. On site, the human-alien hybrids rewrite battlefield positioning with grappling hooks that pull themselves and enemies around at will.

These first two groups are inserted via a flashy new story mission that also introduces the Chosen, the "Lost" (a sort of environmental hazard in the form of zombie hordes), and exploding, flamethrowing alien troopers called Purifiers. Just like the base game, War of the Chosen throws a lot at you very, very quickly. Given that, by this point, I was already dealing with the usual mind-controlling Sectoids and poison-spitting Vipers, the turn-based strategy portion of the early game can sink an unprepared or unlucky player quickly.

As former Advent-turned-freedom fighters, the Skirmishers are certainly the most striking resistance faction.

Hey, look! Literal fires to put out!

Every Chosen has unique strengths and weaknesses—often tied to a particular faction.

Some elements, like this first retaliation mission, have been made easier over the base game.

The Lost are more like an environmental hazard than real enemies. They can swarm you but are extremely weak.

I'd bet anything Mox here has less than a 75-percent chance of hitting that zombie...

Some new maps and mission types squeezed their way in between all the flashier new features.

Some resource gathering and XP grinding busywork can be handled automatically through the resistance.

The Chosen can do some serious damage.

You can now make your own custom propaganda posters after missions and when soldiers develop relationships. It's... very silly.

Spectres are among the most annoying new enemies.

Unlike standard XCOM 2, however, the overarching strategy layer is full enough to match the grid-based battles. Each resistance faction allows you to issue Orders—month-long buffs that are basically the inverse of the original game's negative Dark Events. But this wouldn't be XCOM if the odds were even. Every month, the Chosen build toward assaults on XCOM HQ. If they succeed, they trigger a make-or-break defense mission that means "game over" if you lose.

For all the personality in most of the new cut scenes devoted to these moments, it's odd that the third resistance faction, the Templars, gets almost none of it. When you discover the melee-focused psychic commandos on the overworld map, there's no zombie-infested, Chosen-embattled story scene signaling their appearance. They just... show up with an exquisitely arrogant welcome from John de Lancie (oh, did I most of the new resistance characters are voiced by former Star Trek: The Next Generation actors?).

Balancing favorites

This is a shame, because like the other two juntas, the Templars are great. Their units start every mission moderately weak but gain strength, evasion, and mobility with every melee kill. Not to mention they can soak up one enemy hit per turn, provided they attacked on the last one, making them excellent front-liners.

In fact, all three new unit classes are so good, you probably won't want to use your standard XCOM grunts that much anymore. That goes double if you have the robotic "SPARK" soldiers from the Shen's Last Gift DLC. With up to just six slots on any given squad, ordinary Grenadiers, Sharpshooters, and the like can easily to take a backseat.

But War of the Chosen prevents playing unit favorites by adding yet another nuisance to manage. Besides being physically wounded, which locks a given unit out of missions until they heal, soldiers can now develop negative psychological traits, not unlike Afflictions from the equally difficult, risk/reward game Darkest Dungeon.

Going on too many missions in a row makes soldiers tired, which makes them more susceptible to these traits. That means regularly cycling through units—and experimenting with lineups—is more important than ever if you want to prevent your units from panicking at the sight of robots or ignoring your commands.

Balancing out those quirks are Fire Emblem-esque relationships between squadmates that give active and passive new abilities. These relationships start by being letting the participants take extra turns once per mission but quickly add accuracy bonuses, elemental resistances, and more as the pairs get cozier.

Back and forth battles

It's not just the psychological pros and cons, or Dark Events versus resistance orders. All the new dangers in War of the Chosen seem to have equally fresh counters to the point that I'd guess developer Firaxis wanted every player to be able to accomplish everything in a single run. Every soldier can learn every skill in their class. Every resistance faction can be courted and appeased. Every special weapon and order can be procured. The tradeoff is all those new fires to put out and new perils that must be wriggled out of in the turn-based tactics portion.

I'd still say War of the Chosen skews slightly easier than the base game, at least on normal difficulty. This is thanks, in large part, to the less dramatic bits of rebalancing: My earliest guns struck more often; the Sectoids were less of a pain thanks to a new weakness to melee attacks; etc. The sheer number of options available to me via resistance operatives seems like more than regular enemies can keep up with. Even the ever-respawning Chosen are at their most deadly merely on the month-to-month meta layer. In combat, they each come with their own best practices to follow to strike down in a few turns.

That's not some terrible criticism. XCOM 2's main problem isn’t that it was too easy but that there just wasn't enough to hunch down and worry over (well, that, and a heaping helping of bugs that seem mostly fixed in this expansion). In the original game—once you learned the old "best practices" for approaching a mission, researched everything there was to research, and leveled up every soldier you cared about—you had a straightforward shot to the end and the credits.

Now, assuming you don't intentionally drag things out, there's always a difficult choice to make. Which units do you send on auto-completing Covert Actions for the resistance? Which Chosen's death do you make a priority, assuming you have time to kill any at all? Which Resistance Orders do you think will best hold off the Chosen for at least one more month? Questions like these occurred in XCOM 2, but not enough to lend the endgame any urgency or to give your vision of XCOM much personality.

Even if you do get ahead of the curve in this expansion—which certainly still happened for me, although not nearly as drastically—there's still the personal touch of the Chosen, resistance stories, and naturally occurring soldier relationships to make each campaign feel somewhat customized. War of the Chosen might just be more XCOM 2, but "more" was exactly what the once-sterile sequel needed. In this case, more really is more.

The good:

Story and personality enhances XCOM 2's tense mathematics more than you'd think

There's now actually stuff to do in the middle and late stages of the campaign

Chosen and resistance units are unique, powerful, and interesting

More new maps, mission types, weapons, and other minutiae than I have time to mention

John de Lancie is always part of "The Good"

The bad:

Templars get the short end of the story stick

Custom soldier designs don't import from your base XCOM 2 save

The ugly:

Despite vastly improved optimization over the messy XCOM 2 launch, I've had a number of crashes and freezes. YMMV, of course.

Verdict: War of the Chosen is the definitive way to play XCOM 2. Even if you weren't impressed with the original package, this feels like a whole new game. Buy it.

WotC is a great update, and the chosen activating dark events, training up against you, and of course showing up in the middle of missions and wreaking havoc when you thought you'd had everything under control makes it much more personal. The chosen mock or sardonically congratulate you every step of the way during a tactical mission.

The added mission types and maps changes things up enough to refresh the game, as does a somewhat wider variety of enemies. However, I wish they stayed a little more true to the alternating turn convention of sides-- the "Ruler Reaction" phase where the enemy rulers get to move after each of your own soldiers acts can lead to very ugly outcomes.

I had a full squad wipe for the first time ever due to the Viper King showing up during an already hard mission. (Yes, that brings back memories of the original X-COM: UFO Defense and having your first move out of the Skyranger trigger reaction fire from an alien with a Blaster Launcher....)

War of the Chosen gets a lot right, but it treats the game's previous DLCs very poorly. The wacky, tough, memorable "Shen's Last Gift" and "Alien Hunters" story missions are gone entirely, and the rewards from those missions just mysteriously show up in your research lab and engineering bay. But all the incidental dialogue is still there, so the characters talk about the events in those missions as if they happened. Who is Dr. Vahlen, and why did she make a Viper King, and why did she make a pistol with a scope? Nobody knows!

Similarly, the SPARK unit doesn't interact with any of the new War of the Chosen features, making it worse than an experienced soldier. It can't form bonds, it can't go on black ops missions, it can't learn extra skills, and it can't benefit from the infirmary. Where the three new hero units have exciting skill trees and integrate seamlessly into the system, the robot just sits there sadly, hoping someone remembered to buy it a better rocket launcher.

Apparently the abilities allow you to super-soldier yourself pretty radly.

RPS has a video with a single soldier killing fifteen enemies in a single turn.

To be fair, with the right perks and order, you could do pretty close to that with the base game. I know I've had a Ranger take out two pods in one turn, for instance. Also, many of the enemies killed in that were Lost (designed to be killed in mass numbers - and attack in mass numbers, to the point where a major concern with them is the amount of ammo you can use in one turn), and he left several enemies untouched that have the chance to really mess you up if they get a good shot in.

The modern version of XCom has always allowed you to super-soldier yourself petty radly. It might not be enough to win, however.

Played the Xcom2 free weekend, it was super buggy and crashing on me every 45-75 minutes. I'd like to play it, but after EW revamped so much and I got bored, I'd prefer to play through WotC as my first playthrough.

With the base game being so buggy I'll probably pick this up on sale a while down the line.

In my experience, like thousands of hours in the Unknown, Within and 2, Iron Man is the only way to X-COM properly. It's addicting because of the risk/reward those games throw at you in such a fantastic way.

I'm really excited for this, hoping that the X-COM 2 problems don't flare up. That game is tough as nails. I never could finish it because the Dark Events just snowball you into oblivion. Also those cobra-men......my God the cobra-men......

It's probably worth mentioning that the Mac version is not , and apparently will not, be available on the Mac App Store. The DLC content exceeds the max size allowed on the store, so people who bought XCom 2 off the Mac App Store are a little screwed.

It's only available on Mac for the Steam version.

Fortunately Feral are happy to credit you a activation Key for Steam for the base game.

So it's a bit of a "WTF Apple ?!?" moment for the Mac App Store (which seem to be happening all too often), but at least Feral is offering a reasonable position to its mutual customers.

Is this something that's played after the initial story is complete, or is it woven into a "new game" start like Enemy Within was?

Woven in, you'll want to start a new campaign. It also will integrate into the new narrative all the old storyline DLC.

Yeah. Also, if you've never played the original - this is the one to get! All the fixes, all the DLC and additional content, and a more complete story. Not that the first of this series (talking about the latest XCOM - not the old DOS game, which was insanely awesome and hard-as-nails) was any slouch.

War of the Chosen gets a lot right, but it treats the game's previous DLCs very poorly. The wacky, tough, memorable "Shen's Last Gift" and "Alien Hunters" story missions are gone entirely, and the rewards from those missions just mysteriously show up in your research lab and engineering bay. But all the incidental dialogue is still there, so the characters talk about the events in those missions as if they happened. Who is Dr. Vahlen, and why did she make a Viper King, and why did she make a pistol with a scope? Nobody knows!

Similarly, the SPARK unit doesn't interact with any of the new War of the Chosen features, making it worse than an experienced soldier. It can't form bonds, it can't go on black ops missions, it can't learn extra skills, and it can't benefit from the infirmary. Where the three new hero units have exciting skill trees and integrate seamlessly into the system, the robot just sits there sadly, hoping someone remembered to buy it a better rocket launcher.

In a Reddit AMA the devs stated that the DLC story missions are disabled by default in new play throughs, lest new players get frustrated with all of the up front story content before they even know how to play the game. You can enable them manually when you start a new campaign.

BTW, while the Reaper's shadow-mode stealth and the Claymore combines the Sharpshooter and Grenadier abilities into an awesome mix, and the Templar's Rend+Momentum+Parry combo is also tasty, I still think a Ranger with Blademaster and Bladestorm remains the most effective single unit type.

Whenever you see a red flare of incoming reinforcements, park your Ranger right on that square and let your human Ginzsu take care of them. You can eliminate an entire dropped pod in many cases, without needing to use up overwatch reaction fire shots....

War of the Chosen gets a lot right, but it treats the game's previous DLCs very poorly. The wacky, tough, memorable "Shen's Last Gift" and "Alien Hunters" story missions are gone entirely, and the rewards from those missions just mysteriously show up in your research lab and engineering bay. But all the incidental dialogue is still there, so the characters talk about the events in those missions as if they happened. Who is Dr. Vahlen, and why did she make a Viper King, and why did she make a pistol with a scope? Nobody knows!

Similarly, the SPARK unit doesn't interact with any of the new War of the Chosen features, making it worse than an experienced soldier. It can't form bonds, it can't go on black ops missions, it can't learn extra skills, and it can't benefit from the infirmary. Where the three new hero units have exciting skill trees and integrate seamlessly into the system, the robot just sits there sadly, hoping someone remembered to buy it a better rocket launcher.

I fully admit the possibility that I just suck at using them; but the SPARK seemed pretty tepid even in the original DLC, so it is really hard to get excited about them if they have been even further neglected.

More durable than a human; but can't use cover; can't be healed by medics; and are repaired one at a time if you have more than one damaged.

Gets a heavy-tier weapon; but so does the heavy(and the SPARK can't use specialty ammo, misses out on grenades; and can't have its weapon upgraded to compensate for its lousy base accuracy; or a PCS applied).

Adaptive armor provides the same squad cover bonues that the W.A.R. suit does; plus doing so continuously and probably being available earlier in the game than it is; but high cover is also applied to adjacent enemies; and clumping your squad to take advantage of the mobile cover tends to be asking for an AoE to the face.

Overdriving allows you to Strike from fairly absurd distances; but the SPARK can't really play Ranger because those are on 3 and 5 turn cooldowns; and it lacks implacable, untouchable, bladestorm, or any analogous "survive the turn after charging into the thick of the enemy" skills.

Repair is adequate enough at what it does; though only worth it because you can't use your real medics.

Sacrifice or Nova are crazy powerful in the right place; but so are all Colonel-level skills; and most of the high end class skills don't involve substantially increasing your risk of damage in order to dish out the hurt.

Combine that with the fairly high cost of 'recruitment'(what 2 elerium cores, 100 supplies, plus some proving ground time?) they are just hard to warm up to. I take the one I got from the Towers mission out now and again, because it's a memento from my invasion-era engineering team; but build more?

(This leads to a further problem: without armor and weapon upgrades a SPARK's only redeeming feature is that one point of shred compared to even rookies with tier 2 or tier 3 weapons and armor; but if you don't field them often their upgrades are on the bottom of the priority list because every other upgrade available will benefit more of your troops, more often. Not a problem for the mop-up phase where you have the entire world supplying you while you finish some shadow chamber research; but makes them really hard to like during the period when supplies are actually constrained.)

War of the Chosen gets a lot right, but it treats the game's previous DLCs very poorly. The wacky, tough, memorable "Shen's Last Gift" and "Alien Hunters" story missions are gone entirely, and the rewards from those missions just mysteriously show up in your research lab and engineering bay. But all the incidental dialogue is still there, so the characters talk about the events in those missions as if they happened. Who is Dr. Vahlen, and why did she make a Viper King, and why did she make a pistol with a scope? Nobody knows!

Similarly, the SPARK unit doesn't interact with any of the new War of the Chosen features, making it worse than an experienced soldier. It can't form bonds, it can't go on black ops missions, it can't learn extra skills, and it can't benefit from the infirmary. Where the three new hero units have exciting skill trees and integrate seamlessly into the system, the robot just sits there sadly, hoping someone remembered to buy it a better rocket launcher.

I fully admit the possibility that I just suck at using them; but the SPARK seemed pretty tepid even in the original DLC, so it is really hard to get excited about them if they have been even further neglected.

More durable than a human; but can't use cover; can't be healed by medics; and are repaired one at a time if you have more than one damaged.

Gets a heavy-tier weapon; but so does the heavy(and the SPARK can't use specialty ammo, misses out on grenades; and can't have its weapon upgraded to compensate for its lousy base accuracy; or a PCS applied).

Adaptive armor provides the same squad cover bonues that the W.A.R. suit does; plus doing so continuously and probably being available earlier in the game than it is; but high cover is also applied to adjacent enemies; and clumping your squad to take advantage of the mobile cover tends to be asking for an AoE to the face.

Overdriving allows you to Strike from fairly absurd distances; but the SPARK can't really play Ranger because those are on 3 and 5 turn cooldowns; and it lacks implacable, untouchable, bladestorm, or any analogous "survive the turn after charging into the thick of the enemy" skills.

Repair is adequate enough at what it does; though only worth it because you can't use your real medics.

Sacrifice or Nova are crazy powerful in the right place; but so are all Colonel-level skills; and most of the high end class skills don't involve substantially increasing your risk of damage in order to dish out the hurt.

Combine that with the fairly high cost of 'recruitment'(what 2 elerium cores, 100 supplies, plus some proving ground time?) they are just hard to warm up to. I take the one I got from the Towers mission out now and again, because it's a memento from my invasion-era engineering team; but build more?

For me the nail in the coffin is you cannot recruit a batch of them, test for psi, then go to town. Just epic fail. Maybe XCom 3 will have AI tech so they can progress.

BTW, while the Reaper's shadow-mode stealth and the Claymore combines the Sharpshooter and Grenadier abilities into an awesome mix, and the Templar's Rend+Momentum+Parry combo is also tasty, I still think a Ranger with Blademaster and Bladestorm remains the most effective single unit type.

Whenever you see a red flare of incoming reinforcements, park your Ranger right on that square and let your human Ginzsu take care of them. You can eliminate an entire dropped pod in many cases, without needing to use up overwatch reaction fire shots....

That's actually a dangerous strategy under WoTC. Just watch them drop in two Purifiers, and have them explode in fireballs when they die...

BTW, while the Reaper's shadow-mode stealth and the Claymore combines the Sharpshooter and Grenadier abilities into an awesome mix, and the Templar's Rend+Momentum+Parry combo is also tasty, I still think a Ranger with Blademaster and Bladestorm remains the most effective single unit type.

Whenever you see a red flare of incoming reinforcements, park your Ranger right on that square and let your human Ginzsu take care of them. You can eliminate an entire dropped pod in many cases, without needing to use up overwatch reaction fire shots....

That's actually a dangerous strategy under WoTC. Just watch them drop in two Purifiers, and have them explode in fireballs when they die...

That's a fair point, but I don't seem to be getting Purifiers landing in drop pods. Lots and lots of Officers/Elite Officers + Stun Lancers + Troopers, or sometimes Shieldbearers or a MEC instead.

BTW, while the Reaper's shadow-mode stealth and the Claymore combines the Sharpshooter and Grenadier abilities into an awesome mix, and the Templar's Rend+Momentum+Parry combo is also tasty, I still think a Ranger with Blademaster and Bladestorm remains the most effective single unit type.

Whenever you see a red flare of incoming reinforcements, park your Ranger right on that square and let your human Ginzsu take care of them. You can eliminate an entire dropped pod in many cases, without needing to use up overwatch reaction fire shots....

That's actually a dangerous strategy under WoTC. Just watch them drop in two Purifiers, and have them explode in fireballs when they die...

That's a fair point, but I don't seem to be getting Purifiers landing in drop pods. Lots and lots of Officers/Elite Officers + Stun Lancers + Troopers, or sometimes Shieldbearers or a MEC instead.

Well, stuff happens.

Just a warning. I know it can happen, because I've had one drop for me. Their stun lancer made it out ok. My ranger got a bit singed. (The third in my case was an officer - who didn't last long enough for the explosion to kill him.)

I'll be remembering to keep a slight distance in the future, unless I don't mind the hit.

It is possible to load your XCOM 2 custom soldiers. You must manually export the soldiers, then copy that file to the WotC directory which is different from the base game. No hand holding at all, which is sad, but the designs import in clean so I'm happy.

Microprose did a brilliant job of walking the line between tough and impossible in the original version. I still play it.The versions that immediately followed didn't catch my interest at the time. This one looks to be worth a try.

It's probably worth mentioning that the Mac version is not , and apparently will not, be available on the Mac App Store. The DLC content exceeds the max size allowed on the store, so people who bought XCom 2 off the Mac App Store are a little screwed.

It's only available on Mac for the Steam version.

Fortunately Feral are happy to credit you a activation Key for Steam for the base game.

So it's a bit of a "WTF Apple ?!?" moment for the Mac App Store (which seem to be happening all too often), but at least Feral is offering a reasonable position to its mutual customers.

Seriously? A ~30GB download(on top of ~40 for the base game, 70GB free recommended) hit some sort of architectural limit? Did they just port that logic straight from iOS or something?

Especially given how enthusiastically Apple pushes high resolution monitors; one would think that supporting programs with fairly weighty asset packs would be at least a token consideration.

I haven't played X-Com 2; but I can say that I was deeply unimpressed by the story and characters in X-Com 1 (2008). To me it just felt like a stereotypical American action movie with eco-stroking cookie-cutter characters. I thought the gameplay was pretty good, but the atmosphere was just too cheesy to take seriously. I think I would have preferred it with no voice-overs or cutscenes at all.

So... reading that X-Com 2 is big on story isn't really selling it to me. I appreciate that different people have different tastes, and that many people probably really enjoyed the story and feel of X-Com 1. So I have to ask, does it have a different style? Or is it similar to the stuff that I didn't like?

After getting deeper into the expansion, I feel they've tuned the difficulty it too high this expansion. I took a break when I my schmuck in full cover got hit for 15 dmg and killed from full health outright. Yeah, yeah you can increase hitpoints, but my experience on normal difficulty was frustrating enough to make me not want to bother. Punish me when I make a mistake, but don't just arbitrarily fuck me with RNG. It might be realistic, but it's far from fun.

I've been playing this the last 8 days and I am setting back the avatar counter repeatedly while at the final mission to see what's under the hood. You can actually do that pretty effectively now with resistance missions that get reset every month, and an order that sets it back by 1 every month.

Lots of new research along the lines of more mods on weapons, more health on armor, class weapon damage increases, cost reductions to buildings.

My favorite feature about the resistance missions is being able to min/max the favorite soldiers in your stable. You get plenty of opportunity to raise hacking, dodge, aim, etc...

The "cards" aka "Orders" the resistance provides are global effect good for the whole month once you put them into place, with a max capacity of 9 or 10 orders total. One particular order adds 2 turns to all missions with a timer. So that's appealing for sure to a big part of the player base.

STTNG cast voices are good fun. Only wish there were more people included.

The Chosen are witty and enjoyable the first time through but start getting annoying and use the Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor.

My biggest beef with all the recent Xcoms is that it got shrunk down from the originals and we are forced to deal with a flawed "Pod" system. But investment into randomizing this system and refinement of the engine suggests we will be stuck with this formula for the near future.

Lots of bugs still exist and Blaster bombs aren't working with elevation changes if you use a gamepad, which is a big downer.

Apparently the abilities allow you to super-soldier yourself pretty radly.

RPS has a video with a single soldier killing fifteen enemies in a single turn.

You could do it in the previous game too. I had a blademaster in the last mission in one of the gates where the enemies teleported, and whenever they spawned and walked through she struck them down (I'll check the video too, the templars sound good!)

It's probably worth mentioning that the Mac version is not , and apparently will not, be available on the Mac App Store. The DLC content exceeds the max size allowed on the store, so people who bought XCom 2 off the Mac App Store are a little screwed.

It's only available on Mac for the Steam version.

Fortunately Feral are happy to credit you a activation Key for Steam for the base game.

So it's a bit of a "WTF Apple ?!?" moment for the Mac App Store (which seem to be happening all too often), but at least Feral is offering a reasonable position to its mutual customers.

That's not good but probably the bigger problem with the Mac version is how badly optimised it is.

On my old late 2013 21.5" iMac (i5/GT750M/8GB) it was basically unplayable despite exceeding the minimum spec. Even with resolution dropped down to 1366x768 and all settings to the lowest it would bounce around 7 to 12fps (according to the Steam frame rate counter). I ended up rebuying it on PS4 as it was so annoying.

I bought a new 2017 4K 21.5" iMac a couple of months ago (i7/560/16GB - probably should have bought the 27" but decided to put the money towards a second 4K monitor instead) and, while better, it's still not good for a relatively undemanding game. At 1080p and lowest settings the frame rate is still only 15 to 20fps. Not exactly unplayable for a turn based strategy game but it still makes navigating the maps rather jerky.

I fully admit the possibility that I just suck at using them; but the SPARK seemed pretty tepid even in the original DLC, so it is really hard to get excited about them if they have been even further neglected.

Beyond that Shen's Last Gift had some of the best storytelling in XCOM 2. Everyone that started the DLC probably suspected that there'd be a certain type of recorded message, but even knowing its coming doesn't make actually watching it any less heart-rending.

That's not good but probably the bigger problem with the Mac version is how badly optimised it is.

On my old late 2013 21.5" iMac (i5/GT750M/8GB) it was basically unplayable despite exceeding the minimum spec. Even with resolution dropped down to 1366x768 and all settings to the lowest it would bounce around 7 to 12fps (according to the Steam frame rate counter). I ended up rebuying it on PS4 as it was so annoying.

So that's a 2.7 or 2.9 GHz quad core. For comparison, it's perfectly playable for me on my 2010 model Mac Pro (3.33 hex core Westmere - so probably vaguely similar performance to your iMac, given that it's an older CPU architecture) at 1280x800. Don't know what display settings it's on, but I've had absolutely no problems with it, unless you count the time it takes to load the game and sometimes saved games.

Quote:

I bought a new 2017 4K 21.5" iMac a couple of months ago (i7/560/16GB - probably should have bought the 27" but decided to put the money towards a second 4K monitor instead) and, while better, it's still not good for a relatively undemanding game. At 1080p and lowest settings the frame rate is still only 15 to 20fps. Not exactly unplayable for a turn based strategy game but it still makes navigating the maps rather jerky.

Honestly, I haven't looked at the frame rate. All I can say is, it's perfectly playable for me, and I'm more than happy with the new stuff the expansion brings. The frustration of having a must-do mission, whilst your top soldiers are out on covert operations (because you're at a point where you really, really, really need to bring the Chosen down lest you face an Avenger assault) and some of the others are tired and hence really shouldn't be taken on a mission unless you're desperate... brilliant.

War of the Chosen is to XCOM 2 in pretty much exactly the same way that Enemy Within was to Enemy Unknown. Actually, more so. If Enemy Within was a "nice to have" (and, IMO, it was so much more), War of the Chosen is a must have. (In my opinion, anyway.) Really, really well done, and I have absolutely no qualms about having paid full price for the expansion, given (a) how much enjoyment I've got out of the base game, and (b) how much enjoyment I'm already getting out of the expansion.

Actually - it's just that the base game and WOTC use different directories for all their data. You can copy the pool file over from the old dir to the new (or symlink or whatever) and it'll work fine for importing.

As for the crashing - I had a couple crashing problems at first with the mods I was trying to use (turns out that Evac All was causing crashes), but once I got those sorted, it ran fine for me. There was a decent number of temporary black screens while loading, but that was probably due to my alt tabbing.

I'm surprised there was no mention of the tiredness aspect, since that also sorta forces you to just not send the same people into combat repeatedly. It was pretty interesting to me.

Actually - it's just that the base game and WOTC use different directories for all their data. You can copy the pool file over from the old dir to the new (or symlink or whatever) and it'll work fine for importing.

As for the crashing - I had a couple crashing problems at first with the mods I was trying to use (turns out that Evac All was causing crashes), but once I got those sorted, it ran fine for me. There was a decent number of temporary black screens while loading, but that was probably due to my alt tabbing.

I'm surprised there was no mention of the tiredness aspect, since that also sorta forces you to just not send the same people into combat repeatedly. It was pretty interesting to me.

On the black screens while loading: That seems to have been a deliberate change, from what I can tell. Loading is much faster now, but you're waiting on a black screen rather than in the Skyranger or something.

Given that I would occasionally have several-minute long loading times in the base game (with lots of mods), and it's now down under 30 seconds (not quite as many mods yet...), I think the change was probably worth it.